Content marketing has reached a saturation point. Practically every business is now actively participating in content marketing, with 85% using it for lead generation. To master it, you have to compete against everyone else in your niche. This means that you can no longer gain an advantage simply through taking part in content marketing. You need to do a better job than your competitors, and therein lays the difficulty.
Do you have what it takes to master content marketing?
What are the Challenges of Content Marketing Today?
Bigger Than Ever – Content marketing is bigger than ever before. It’s an industry all by itself, rather than just a part of the marketing industry. There are gurus, experts, conferences, and guides everywhere. The latest predictions state that content marketing could be worth $300 billion by 2019.
How are you going to find what works and what doesn’t?
It Changes – Content marketing is one of the fastest changing industries in the world today. Content marketing is always changing things. There are major changes to algorithms, social media alterations, and technological upgrades. All of these things could potentially alter the way you operate.
Tech Savvy – Content marketing goes far beyond the bounds of ordinary marketing. It’s about so much more than producing a few pieces of writing. You need to do everything from shoot videos to interact on social media. You need an army of technical skills to actually get it right.
You Need the Right Team
First of all, you need to gather together the right team. Remember that content marketing is far more than employing a great writer. It’s not what the content is it’s how the content is presented. Second-rate content will quickly fall by the wayside as your competitors come up with something better.
To present your content in the right way, you also need to employ both designers and developers. They will handle the technical side of things.
But who is going to coordinate it all? Content marketing scheduling can quickly become one of the most complex aspects of the process. If everything isn’t moving together in the right, you are going to find your campaigns falling flat in a haze of confusion.
For a small business, you may not be able to afford an in-house team like this. The growth of remote working has enabled smaller companies to employ experts at lower prices from across the globe. This is also why content marketing has become so competitive.
The Strategy is Everything
But you can’t aimlessly produce content in the hope it will make you money. It’s easy to rush into content marketing without a clear goal in mind. This is where so many people fall flat because they don’t know what they are trying to accomplish and they have no way of measuring the difference between success and failure.
You should always have a clear timeframe for each campaign, how you are going to accomplish your goals, and measurable metrics.
But It’s All in the Execution
Many companies start out with good intentions. They know what they want to do and roughly how they are going to do it, but the actual execution is where things seem to go wrong. It’s true that things don’t always go to plan, but content that is hastily written and badly promoted will always leave your organization with a negative brand image, assuming anyone even notices you.
The execution of your strategy is something you can only measure as you are doing it. This is where experience comes in. It’s why you have to have a team that knows what they are doing. You need to be steadily learning from each and every success and failure. If you are not moving forward, something is deeply wrong.
Be Obsessed
Finally, this is something you have to be passionate about. Content marketing must get you fired up or you are going to struggle to actually achieve anything. Your competitors are hungrier than you and they are going to go the extra mile to improve their skills.
Getting obsessed about content marketing ensures that you are going to work longer and harder than anyone else to find the perfect marketing mix.
Last Word
Content marketing is something that can be difficult to get to grips with, but if you are willing to work at it there’s no reason why you can’t succeed.
What are your top tips for making content marketing work?
